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A New Year allows you to find ways to improve throughout your daily life. It is also a time to reflect on ways to keep your online presence more secure and away from the prying eyes of hackers. Here are a few things to remember as you enact new resolutions through 2024.

Keep Your Passwords in Order

There’s a pretty good chance that you use an online service to do something that makes your life easier. Whether it involves banking or ordering something online, the Internet has streamlined your errands in ways not thought possible decades ago.

However, accessing these time-saving features requires you to provide some personal information. Due to this, it will be necessary to keep your online accounts secure and inaccessible to unauthorized parties.

Although this sounds rudimentary, keeping your passwords secure and updating them regularly is important. The password is the last line of defense for keeping your data away from hackers and thieves.

There are plenty of tutorials to create a strong password. In general, you don’t want to make a password too easy by just making it the name of your pet or your birthday. Try using phrases that are relevant only to you and creating variations of them to foil hacking programs.

Another thing to remember is to avoid redundancy. Using only one password for a handful of accounts is like giving your house keys to a stranger. If you have multiple online accounts (and chances are you do), make a different password for each.

We get it: there comes a point where making a unique password for everything becomes a hassle to handle. For this, we recommend that you use a password manager. For starters, many web browsers have a password manager function that can help you make strong passwords and enter them for you when necessary.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication on Your Accounts

In today’s always-online world, keeping your login credentials secure is like keeping your house locked while you’re away. If you only have one lock and an intruder picks it, then there is nothing stopping them from breaking in and taking what is rightfully yours.

Don’t make it easy for hackers to take your stuff or pose as you. Fortify your online presence by enabling multi-factor authentication on your accounts.

Multi-factor authentication (better known as MFA) adds another layer of security to your login process. Before accessing your account by entering a password, an MFA client verifies your identity through another channel to ensure it is you who wants to log into a service.

An MFA process may use your mobile device to complete the login process or text your phone to enter a one-time login code. This extra layer of security has many advantages, like:

• Ensuring it is only the account owner who is accessing the account
• Warn you of unauthorized access attempts
• Makes it more difficult for hackers to access personal information
  

Many online banking apps utilize MFA, as well as Google and Apple. It’s like putting a second lock on your front door to deter break-ins. If you haven’t already done so, it is highly recommended that you enable MFA on all your online accounts that support it.

Reduce Oversharing on Social Media

The proliferation of social media has made it very easy to share life’s special moments with friends, family, and former classmates. On the other hand, it has also opened up a wide avenue for bad-faith actors to scrape your personal information.

It is understandable to want to share your big life milestones with the people you care about. At the same time, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X are largely open forums that make your status updates, photos, and videos accessible to the world at large.

The items you share on social media can and will come back to haunt you. Hackers can scrape your photos to craft personalized messaging scams, and sharing your personal information on these platforms makes you an easy target for fraud or identity theft.

We’re not saying you should shut down your social media accounts immediately. Instead, be conscientious about using platforms that make information public by default. Never share your contact information online, and never post photos of your credit card or personal information for everyone to see.

Hackers and fraudsters are looking for quick and easy ways to impersonate your appearance to make their scams more believable. Do not make their job easier by sharing more things online than is necessary.

Back-up Your Important Information

Your pictures and sensitive documents are snapshots of your life. Therefore, it makes sense to do your best to secure them so that you can enjoy looking back on them for years to come.

Regarding sensitive information, it is crucial to ensure that what you want to save is secure and accessible. To that end, we recommend backing up important documents and keepsakes when you can.

Keeping duplicates of financial records and documents makes it easier to do things like file taxes or make insurance claims. In that same vein, keeping extra copies of photos or similar items ensures you have a record for your family that can be committed to posterity. A backup is also handy if a ransomware attack or hacking attempt hijacks your devices.

To keep your information accessible, it is recommended to make backups or upload this type of data to a secure cloud service. You can use password-backed (with MFA!) services like Google, Apple Cloud, or a trusted third party.

You can also take the servicer out of the equation by instead backing up your files and photos onto an external hard drive and storing it in a fireproof safe or another secure location. After all, it isn’t just hackers who can destroy your sensitive data, as Mother Nature has more than one trick up its sleeve.

When refining your cybersecurity through the New Year, First Florida Credit Union has your back. Learn how you can secure your financial information and make transactions worry-free.